Breaking Point

  “I don’t do Tent City,” said Sean. He was watching me warily through the corner of his eye.

  “And I don’t wash windows,” said Wallace. “Tomorrow you will.”

  Chase leaned toward Wallace, but spoke loudly enough that we could all hear.

  “Don’t do this.”

  Wallace scraped a hand over his scruffy jaw. “You’d rather hide your whole life? Waste away here?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Chase countered. “Why don’t you ever leave, Wallace? Is your life so much more valuable than hers?”

  An electric silence filled the room. My cheeks burned, as though Chase’s outburst had been my own. No one challenged Wallace like that, even if the point he made was true.

  “That’s bordering on insubordination,” said Riggins.

  “You’re damn right it is.” Wallace stepped up to Chase, shorter, narrower, but unafraid. “Someone’s got to stay behind, Jennings. That’s the way this works. You think you’re man enough for the job, by all means, sit back here and wait. See how easy it is.”

  “I’m in.” I didn’t realize I’d said it until Sean whipped his head toward me.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asked under his breath. “A new haircut doesn’t make you bulletproof, Ember.”

  “When do we leave?” I was beginning to tremble in anticipation. I wanted to go as soon as possible so I couldn’t change my mind. Riggins clapped, looking genuinely impressed. Chase’s gaze was boring a hole through me, but I couldn’t look in his direction.

  Wallace’s thin lips stretched into a smile. “When curfew lifts.”

  “Sounds like fun,” said a female voice from the doorway. “Where do I sign up?”

  I spun toward the sound. Cara.

  She looked only slightly worse for wear—her clothes were marked with dirt like the others’ had been, and her hair was stiff from dried sweat. Though she barely acknowledged me, I was relieved to know she was alive.

  “What happened?” Lincoln launched himself across the room and lifted her into an embrace. She laughed and patted his back.

  “Just laid low for a while,” she said. “I lost you two, and then the sniper hit the draft setup, so I locked down and waited it out.”

  “Clever girl,” said Wallace. Discussion of tomorrow’s mission was over for now. Before I left the room I looked once more at Chase, now staring out the window alone. I thought he’d try to stop me; I wanted him to try to stop me. But he didn’t.

  It probably wouldn’t have changed my decision anyway.

  * * *

  “EMBER? Ember!”

  I raced toward my mother’s voice, near the front of the house. I’d followed the two soldiers to her bedroom, where they had opened her dresser drawers and were rifling through her clothes.

  “Mom!” We collided; my arms locked around her waist, and I buried my tears in her blouse. She shifted me to the side as the soldiers came into view.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “Routine inspection, ma’am,” said the first soldier. His navy uniform still had the press lines across the shoulders, like he’d just pulled it out of a package.

  “How dare you come into my house when my daughter is home alone!”

  He passed a nervous look to his partner, who stepped forward. There was something familiar about him, something I couldn’t place. “According to the Reformation Act we don’t need your permission, ma’am. Besides, if you need child care, the Church of America provides services, free of cost.”

  I detached from her side, arms bolting down. I was eleven, I didn’t need a babysitter.

  My mother’s face was positively livid. “Don’t tell me how to raise—”

  “Now,” continued the soldier. “Is there someone I can talk to? Your husband, maybe? When will he be home?”

  I’d never seen her speechless before. The soldiers looked at each other, and the first made a note on the clipboard he was carrying.

  “Very well,” said the familiar one. “You’re out of compliance with the Moral Statutes on seventeen counts today. Since it’s the first time we’re just going to issue a warning, but next time, it’ll be a citation for each one. Do you understand what that means?”

  I kept staring at him. His features were too sharp, his hair too golden. His eyes were emerald, and hypnotizing, like a snake’s.

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked. But I remembered the assembly we’d had last week at school, when a soldier, older than these two, had come to talk to us about the Federal Bureau of Reformation and the Moral Statutes. “New Rules,” he’d called them. “For a better tomorrow.”

  I’d told my mother about the new rules, and she’d laughed. That bitter laugh, like when she’d lost her job. Like all of this was some kind of sick joke, one that would never actually be real. I knew right then that I’d have to pay more attention to them, for both of us.

  “Of course, we could always make a deal,” said the soldier with the green eyes. He leaned forward and reached for my face, thumb trailing gently down my damp cheek. My gaze lowered to his gold name badge, where MORRIS was typed out in perfect black letters.

  I know you. I should have been afraid, but I was so mesmerized by his touch that I didn’t feel his fingers slip around my throat until it was too late.

  * * *

  I WOKE like a shot, gasping and writhing, ripped from the nightmare by a hand closing around my ankle, evoking another wave of panic. The thin, shredded blanket tightened around my waist. I scrambled back until my head cracked against the wall and I blinked back stars.

  “Ember.” The familiarity of Chase’s voice tempted me to lower my guard. “Easy. It’s okay. It was just a dream.”

  A dream? I couldn’t trust it. I could still feel that oppressing weight, pinning me in place. I could feel the voice within me, drawing my tongue against my teeth to scream.

  It was the last sound I’d heard before Tucker Morris’s fingers tightened around my throat.

  I was sitting on the upper corner of the bed, knees locked into my chest. Without the candlelight I could only see a slight differentiation of shadows from where Chase sat on the opposite edge of the mattress.

  He flipped on the flashlight, laying it at my feet like a peace offering. In its glow I could see the room clearly. The lumpy, bare mattress and the old chair where he slept. Our shoes and backpack ready by the door. The crumbling drywall wearing away to reveal the wooden bones of my sanctuary.

  Tomorrow I’d step outside the front door for the first time in a month, and I might not come back.

  “It’s okay to be scared.” It was as if he’d read my mind.

  “I’m not,” I lied. I don’t even know why I bothered.

  “All right,” he said slowly. “I’m just saying that if you were, it would be okay.”

  I rested my chin on my knees, longing for the familiarity of my own bed. The smooth feel of my own sheets and the perfect weight of my blankets. I missed home.

  “Why’d he turn me in and not you?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he answered with a sigh. “But he wouldn’t have if it didn’t benefit him somehow. I’m just surprised he waited this long.”

  It did seem strange that someone would sit on this kind of information for a month before talking.

  “How would it help him to fess up that I escaped on his watch?” I wondered aloud. Maybe someone had found out, pressured Tucker to talk. My mind flashed to the civilian woman who’d worked at the detention facility—Delilah. She’d been the only other person to know we’d left, but I doubted she had leaked the information. She was too afraid of Tucker to say anything that might get him in trouble, like the fact that we’d escaped on his shift.

  Chase shook his head. “I can’t figure it out.”

  We remained quiet, listening to the sirens downtown rounding up the curfew-breakers, and the bursts of raucous laughter from a room at the end of the hall. He shifted, and the rustle of fabric reminded me of
the last time we’d been alone together in the dark, of the distance that had settled between us since. I wondered with a pang if he was going to return to the chair or even leave, but instead he faced me, all of him now on the bed. The flashlight made his white socks glow.

  “I know this story,” he said with some uncertainty. “Sometimes it helps me sleep.”

  I nodded my consent.

  “Okay,” he began, inching closer. “I was…”

  “Once upon a time,” I prompted. He looked down and smiled, pulling at the strings hanging off the end of his pant leg.

  “Right. Once upon a time there was this eight-year-old boy, who had to move to … this faraway town. This all happened a long time ago, when people had lots of junk to cart around, so they had to rent this big truck to carry it all.”

  I thought of how all the things we owned could now fit into one bag. He turned so we were facing the same direction, and settled back on his elbows, two feet away. His feet hung off the mattress.

  My clasped hands loosened.

  “We … I mean they, drove for two days until they got to the place in the pictures his dad had shown them. It seemed all right; big at least. The boy got his own room. But the best part was that there was this old haunted house up the street.” He grinned. “Classic haunted. It even had an old cemetery outside. So he went to check it out but this other boy—in a pink shirt—jumped out of the bushes and told him to get lost, because, get this, the place wasn’t safe.”

  Hazily, that shirt appeared in my memory—an artifact from another life.

  He laughed dryly, collapsing farther and rolling onto his side so that his head was resting on his knuckles. Tentatively I mirrored his position, laying my head on my bent arm. He was still a couple feet away, but now looking down on me.

  “Turns out he was a she; she’d cut her own hair. Something about falling asleep chewing gum. All I’m saying is it must have been a lot of gum.…”

  I kneed him in the ribs without thinking. He winced. I’d forgotten they’d been broken during his arrest, but he began to laugh, so I didn’t feel the need to apologize.

  His hand stayed on my calf though, holding my shin against his body. I swallowed. I could feel him, not from behind a sheet of glass, but here.

  “Anyway, this girl was clearly crazy, out there all alone with her pink shirt and boy hair, so our hero let it slide that she was trying to boss him around, and told her she’d better let him in because obviously the place was haunted, and he needed to investigate or else … I don’t know, who knows what would’ve happened. So, they went inside.…”

  I smiled.

  “And it turns out it was the scariest damn place he had ever been in his life. Not safe at all for little girls. He was fine, of course. Perfectly fine. But it wasn’t right to make a girl stay there, so he told her he heard her mom calling. Just so she didn’t feel bad for being such a baby.”

  A giggle bubbled up inside of me.

  I’d never been brave enough to go into that old house alone, but when Chase had shown up, intent to see beyond the splintering white columns and broken shutters, I couldn’t say no. I hadn’t known that the sour smell was asbestos and the raised veins in the wallpaper were termite highways. You didn’t think of those things at six. You only thought about how fear could be split down the middle like an orange, so both of you could eat half.

  He pulled me a little closer and I didn’t even tense.

  “You’ll never guess where she lived.”

  As our smiles faded I noticed that his hand had moved up to the outside of my thigh, and his fingers were drawing small, slow circles that seared through my jeans. It had seemed logical to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, but now I wondered what his touch would have felt like on my bare skin.

  His fingers brushed the dark, cropped bangs away from my eyes, and his lips pressed softly against my brow.

  “I remember who you are. Even if you forget,” he said.

  My eyelids weighed down, and in my last conscious moments I felt the warmth of his hand on my leg, the pressure of his touch, making me real. Not just a shadow. Not just a memory.

  * * *

  I DRESSED alone in our room, facing the blank wall, wishing it would inspire a clear mind. My thoughts raced with anticipation of what the day might bring, always returning to the same image: the holding cell in the base. The sterile floor, the threadbare mattress that smelled of bleach and vomit, the overhead lights that buzzed and flickered. And Tucker Morris leaning in the doorway, his green eyes saying I knew you’d be back.

  I reminded myself that I’d lived through his internment before, and focused on the mission.

  My hands shook as I buttoned up the starchy blouse, as I zipped up the itchy wool skirt and tied the triangular scarf in a sailor’s knot around my neck. I wondered what Ms. Brock, my evil headmistress at the Girls’ Reformatory, would think if she saw me now, back—by choice—in a uniform I’d resisted so fervently.

  Curfew ended with a sputtering of yellow light that had me jumping out of my skin.

  Houston and Lincoln had already left with Cara, scouting our path for any positioned FBR. We would go next, followed by Sean, dressed as a soldier, and Riggins in street clothes. Sean would meet us outside of Tent City, the others would keep to our shadows and watch for trouble.

  I walked out of the room and came face-to-face with Chase. A look of disappointment crossed his face when he saw that I’d actually changed; clearly he’d been hoping I wouldn’t go through with it. He straightened to his full height. The MM insignia—the U.S. flag flying over the cross—branded the pocket of his navy flack jacket, just above the name badge VELASQUEZ. His pants bloused over newly greased black boots. In the stolen uniform, Chase looked almost exactly as he had when he’d arrested my mother.

  I realized he’d never said he would come. Some things he didn’t have to say out loud.

  The next thing I knew, Sean, Chase, and I were in the empty lobby, standing before the double doors. It was still dark on account of the thick rain clouds, and I was glad for the added cover. I put my hand on the glass, edging it open, feeling the cool, misty morning air seducing me out into danger, just as the familiarity of the fourth floor pulled me back.

  “The Sisters are different here,” Sean said. “Remember Brock? She had full authority over the soldiers at the reformatory—you’d never see her back down. In the cities, Sisters are charity workers. Models of obedience. They’ve got power, but not over the FBR. They’re the kind of women the Statutes intended them to be, got it?”

  Subservient. Respectful. Spineless.

  “Got it,” I said.

  He paused, and then squeezed my arm. “You better go.”

  I swallowed. “Bye, Sean.”

  “I’ll be right behind you.” He hesitated, and then turned away from the door, as if he didn’t want to see us step outside. I was glad for the privacy. He was making me nervous.

  “Ember,” Chase started, then shook his head. “Just stay with me, all right?”

  There was something else he wanted to say, but I didn’t give him the chance. I nodded and pushed the door open.

  For a moment I stood on the dark street, holding my breath, expecting something earth-shattering to occur. As if the whole MM was just waiting for me to show my face so they could shoot me. But nothing happened.

  Beside me, Chase transformed. His expression grew grave, his eyes daunting. When we began to walk, each long purposeful stride had me hurrying to keep up. I dropped my gaze, and kept several feet behind him, because no woman walked side by side with a soldier.

  A light rain had started by the time we reached the corner. It lowered the bruised sky, coating my forearms and the back of my neck with a prickly layer of moisture that made my skin feel itchy and somehow foreign. Without hesitation, we turned into a dank alley, garnished by overturned trash cans and stray animals. I nearly tripped over a man’s foot that stuck out from beneath a flattened cardboard box. Each sound—the flap
ping of a pigeon’s wings, a clatter from within a Dumpster—shoved my heart into my throat. My gaze roamed, but no one seemed to see us. Which was good. For now.

  Finally, the alley opened to a street, kitty-corner from Knoxville’s city square. Two soldiers were positioned at the entrance to the Square, distracted by the words SAVE US SNIPER spray-painted across the front of an empty shop. The neon green letters drooled down the wall. I stared at the scene, wide-eyed, surprised by my own approval, before fixing my gaze on the ground.

  Hastily, we moved past. The soldiers didn’t even turn their heads.

  I padded around the empty Contraband Items bins and condemned buildings, trying hard to shut out the chorus of groans and steady whimpers from the shapeless piles of tattered clothing strewn across the red bricks. Homeless civilians, maybe a thousand of them, immigrants from the fallen cities who’d come here for help or pity. They huddled together against the gusting wind to conserve energy. The last time I’d been here, Sean had been inciting a riot, but now the place was as somber as a funeral. With the MM’s lockdown on rations, there was little to do but starve.

  I glanced back, but the soldiers weren’t following. We passed the abandoned shops filled with squatters. Passed the large painted sign over an empty store that read: SEVEN P.M. WORSHIP SERVICE—MANDATORY. I remembered the church I’d made us go to back home after we’d received an Article 1 citation for failure to observe the national religion. While I gave our names to the church recorder, my mother would steal cookies from the welcome table.

  The way cleared for Chase; no one looked at us twice.

  I turned left, focusing on Chase’s heels. On the sidewalk before me a group crowded around a rain barrel, fishing out the cloudy liquid with a peeling, tin cup, fastened to the wood by a metal chain. Most bore the signs of malnourishment. Hollowed cheeks. Ashy skin. In contrast, their bodies looked bloated, loaded by layer upon layer of clothing. Trust ran thin these days; any possession left unattended was fair game.

  A skin-and-bones tenant broke from the pack and approached me, sunken eyes searching hungrily over my disguise. A girl’s summer dress fringed out beneath his holey sweater, and for a fleeting moment I thought of the Statutes that had been hammered into my brain at the Girls’ Reformatory. Wearing clothes inappropriate for your gender could mean an Article 7 violation.